I think most mobile browsers emit "hover" state whenever you tap / drag / swipe over something in the page. "active" state is even more reliable IMO. But yes, you are right that it is problematic. Quoting MDN page about ":hover" [1]:
> Note: The :hover pseudo-class is problematic on touchscreens. Depending on the browser, the :hover pseudo-class might never match, match only for a moment after touching an element, or continue to match even after the user has stopped touching and until the user touches another element. Web developers should make sure that content is accessible on devices with limited or non-existent hovering capabilities.
They had to, and had to make that decision when mobile browsers were first developed, because so many sites had navigation flyouts that relied on :hover. So they had to have something trigger that pseudoselector.
I really wish modern touchscreens spent the extra few cents to support hover. Samsung devices from the ~2012 era all supported detection of fingers hovering near the screen. I suspect it’s terrible patent laws holding back this technology, like most technologies that aren’t headline features.
I’d be surprised if it was related to patent law; hover detection is fundamentally straightforward with capacitive touchscreens and it’s just a matter of calibrating the capacitance curve, and deciding whether to expose a hover state or not.
No, the reason is just because it’s too fiddly and too unreliable (to use, I mean, more than the touchscreen itself being unreliable, though the more sensitive you tune it the more that will become a problem as well).
Apple had their 3D Touch and they dropped it because (from what I hear, I never used it) it largely confused people due to non-obviousness/non-familiarity, required more care to use accurately than people liked (or, in some cases, were able to provide), and could become unreliable.
I’ve used a variety of “normal” capacitive touchscreens that could be activated anywhere from a few millimetres from the surface to requiring a firm/large-surface-area touch. It’s all about how they’re calibrated, and how much they’ve deteriorated (public space ones seem to often go very bad astonishingly quickly).
Most recently, in Indian airports the checkin machines that you can choose to use say that they’re touchless, that you can just put your finger near and it will work and isn’t that all lovely and COVID-19-aware of them, but on three separate machines I’ve tried it very carefully and couldn’t get it to activate before touching the screen.
That's interesting. Did they pass the :hover event down to the browser?
I have to have two interfaces for my web apps, because sometimes I want to hide some text of marginal value behind a :hover, but only a mouse can see it unless I break it out somehow for touch.
